This book examines the factors which shape the criminal justice response to domestic violence in the light of policy changes at the beginning of the 1990s which aimed to increase arrest rates. In particular, the book discusses the needs and expectations of victims and examines how theirchoices impact on decisions made by police and prosecutors. Many books on the criminal justice response to domestic violence start from the premise that withdrawal of complaints by victims and the subsequent discontinuance of cases, represents some kind of failure on the part of the agenciesinvolved and that victims would benefit from greater determination by police to prosecute offenders wherever possible. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the criminal justice system as it presently operates is capable of responding effectively to the needs of victims of domesticviolence. This book throws doubt on the validity of these assumptions.

Negotiating Violence examines the ways in which ordinary people used a transnational papal court of law for disputing their private local hostilities and for negotiating their social status and identities. Following the career and routine crossovers of runaway friars, the book offers vivid insights into the late medieval culture of violence, honour, emotions, learning and lay-clerical interactions. The story plays itself out in the large composite state of the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, which collapses under the Ottomans’ sword in front of the readers’ eyes. The bottom-up approach of the Christian-Muslim military conflict renders visible the rationalities of those commoners who voluntarily crossed the religious boundary, while the multi-tiered story convincingly drives home the argument that the motor of social and religious change was lay society rather than the clergy in this turbulent age.

This edited volume addresses the important issue of negotiating with terrorists, and offers recommendations for best practice and processes. Hostage negotiation is the process of trying to align two often completely polarised parties. Authorities view hostage taking as unacceptable demands made by unacceptable means. However terrorists view their actions as completely justified, even on moral and religious grounds. If they are to try and reconcile these two sides, it is essential for hostage negotiators to understand terrorist culture, the hostage takers’ profiles, their personality, their view of the world and also the authorities, their values and their framing of the problem raised by the taking of hostages. Although not advocating negotiating with terrorists, the volume seeks to analyse when, why, and how it is done. Part I deals with the theory and quantifiable data produced from analysis of hostage situations, while Part II explores several high profile case studies and the lessons that can be learnt from them. This volume will be of great interest to students of terrorism studies, conflict management, negotiation, security studies and IR in general. I William Zartman is the Jacob Blaustein Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Organization and Conflict Resolution and former Director of the Conflict Management and African Studies Programs, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Processes of International Negotiation (PIN) Program at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. He is author/editor of over 20 books on negotiation, conflict and mediation. Guy Olivier Faure is Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne University, Paris I, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Processes of International Negotiation (PIN) Program at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. He has served as an advisor to French government on hostage negotiations.

The favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro provide an ideal case study since they are renowned for high levels of police and gang violence resulting in high death rates among young black men, causing both outrage and fear. This book foregrounds women's experiences and how different forms of violence overlap and reinforce one another.

Residents of Parma, Italy pride themselves on their sophistication and connection to European modernity. But despite a reputation for civility, intimate partner violence continues to take place, largely hidden from public view. Offering a detailed ethnography of two women's shelters—one leftist, the other Catholic—this book provides the political, cultural, and legal contexts of competing explanations for intimate partner violence. Some contend that violence against women reflects the cultural and historical gender inequalities embedded in Italian society, including "old-fashioned" or "traditional" understandings of masculinity. Others argue that it stems from confusion and ambivalence over "new" or "modern" forms of gender relations. While the first explanation places the blame on tradition and the second cites the transition to modernity, both emphasize societal understandings of gender and point to collective, rather than individual, responsibility. Through an intimate portrayal of everyday life, Sheltering Women reveals how violence against women can be studied as one part of a continuum of locally relevant understandings of gender relations and gender change.

In 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds? Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.

Violence In Colombia provides students with a deeper understanding of the crisis facing Colombia today. The book focuses on the 1990s, a decade that witnessed a strengthening of the oldest and largest guerrilla insurgency in the Americas and the emergence of a powerful paramilitary right. The decade also saw a dramatic rise in homicide, kidnapping, and human rights violations that made Colombia by far the most violent nation in the hemisphere. But the 1990s was also about negotiating peace. The decade began with negotiations between the government and some of the guerrilla groups that led to their demobilization and to the important reforms codified in the Constitution of 1991. It ended with another serious attempt at negotiating peace, a historic agreement between the government and the largest and most powerful of the guerrilla groups to put a range of social and economic reforms on the negotiating table. For many, the crisis in Colombia is understood in terms of the drug trade. To be sure, the drug trade is implicated in every aspect of the crisis. And despite (or because of?) escalating efforts by the Colombian and U.S. governments to curb the trade, Colombia's role as the leading supplier of cocaine, and increasingly of heroin, to the U.S. market continues to expand. But the drug trade, by itself, cannot explain the crisis. If it could, why have other Latin American drug-producing and trafficking nations not experienced a fate like Colombia's? To answer this question, the book presents some of the best recent work by Colombian scholars on the crisis facing the nation. Violence in Colombia also includes a large section devoted to primary documents, which enables students to get a feel for the views of the protagonists in the conflict and judge for themselves the meaning of what they say. Examples include the negotiating positions of the government, the guerrillas, and the paramilitary right; testimony by kidnap victims and human rights lawyers; and assessments by U.S. officials and Colo